wow sneak a crocodile onto my plane and have him bite my head off wearing a swimsuit wow draw sea mammals on my face with chinese paint until i get lead poisoning wow put me in a bathtub with a shark put me in a room with a bear and a mountain lion fighting and have the winner eat me for a snack put me in a room with the doors closed and the lights off and the sound of two men fricking and i will pretend to be disgusted but really i’m not because love is love and love is beautiful give me the trigger to a loaded gun i wont fire it but i will find someone who will i will find someone naked and beautiful so i don’t feel like i died at the hands of someone who wasn’t naked and beautiful
wow turn me into bubble gum chew me 666 times then spit me out onto the sidewalk i will be satanic bubble gum on the sidewalk i will be satanic bubble gum in the places that gum can be i will be satanic bubble gum in the discarded gum wrappers in the trash can i will be satanic bubble gum on the bottom of your shoe when it rains i will be satanic bubble gum underneath some daughter’s desk so she doesn’t get caught chewing satanic bubble gum in class, until i puke blood on a lacy pink heart on valentines day and the boy she gives it to asks “what is this” and she says “i dont know its not mine” but if im not yours then whose am i, and if you dont know, where can i go but here
i will be here long after you have gone i will be here long after you have logged off and i will be here alone, but not alone. alone surrounded by the ones and zeros who love me.
i want to be the all-seeing all-knowing cock of the universe when we fuck i want to sweat you out like raw garlic i want you in my blood i want to sweat you out. it is useless to be honest. nobody is honest. not even u when you are trying to be honest. i want u to be honest. i want to fill this water bottle with kool-aid like i want to fill the universe with my soul like i want to fill my soul with love for you when i die i want to turn into space dust and zip around at the speed of light until i become a nebula.
when im in the shower i try not to think about parallel universes i try not to think about the parallel universes where we are still together but sometimes i do. sometimes i think that this future is a future where i am wholly alone a future that i could not have gotten to with you but i hurt wishing that i could.
i still hurt with the hot water now that it is cold and winter and i still hurt in the cold water when it was hot in the summer. maybe when it is spring it wont hurt. maybe in the spring i wont feel sad. i feel sad.
when i feel sad i feel like in the halls of an abandoned school i am waiting and in the halls of an abandoned school i will wait. i will wait, listening to students studying sentence transformations. (the school abandoned we are here but we are not here) and here- an interrogative: where have u gone?
i am in the interrogative. i will wait for you in the interrogative, and i will wait in the simplest construction of a sentence. i will wait. i am listening. i feel sad.
i will meet you at a bus station in santa monica that is where ill be i am confused but i hve twenty dollars and i will buy a ticket and that is where ill be. i will sit on the pier until i am with u on the beach and the first time we didn’t kiss but u asked me too. i will walk by the promenade until i am with u when u are sick but we eat burritos anyway until i am with u hopng to eat more burritos in the future. i will sit on the bench until i am with u in my memories and only in my memories and then i will go back to the bus and go home because you are not coming. i will turn back & see the sun set. beautiful.
i think that i am falling into a lot of traps of "bad" poetry when i am writing trying to simplify myself and i am perpetually worried that i am writing poetry in the vein of what paul fussell talks about when he says
a lot of people take the term free verse literally, with the result that there is more bad free verse written today than one can easily shake a stick at. most of it hopes to recommend itself by deploying vaguely surrealistic images in unmetered colloquial idiom to urge acceptable opinions: that sex is a fine thing, that accurate perception is beter than dull, that youth is probably a nicer condition than age, that there is more to things than their appearances [...]. All very true and welcome. yet what is lamentably missing is the art that makes poems re-readable once we have fathomed what they 'say'
(poetic meter & form 88).
but at the same time i feel personally that what im writeing now is better and speaks more to people than what i have written before. i dunno it is all very confuseing.
I don't want to be a downer here, but that isn't really poetry as much as it is vulgar nonsense. And it's not even good nonsense. I think you should read more so you can get a better idea for what "form" in poetry is in addition to expanding your vocabulary and syntax.
On November 30 2012 14:28 Azera wrote: I still don't understand
Edit: Oh god LOL
What revelation did you have in your edit? :O
samz's original post was when he only re-wrote the poem. His edit, which was where he added the "WOW:Now that's what I call music" thing, was when I edited my post. Makes sense? >.<
One thing I noticed is that there is almost no rhymes at all. Everything just feels like a speech rather than poem, you know what I'm saying?
yes this is what i intended. rhyme is the poetic technique that i would drop before all else.
I would suggest improving your English before writing poems
the errors are mostly intentional. if you're talking about the errors in the txt you would be glad to know altho i am sad to report that they are very much cleaned up from their original versions (i will meet yuo at a bus stiaton in santa monica that is where i”ll be). you have to make these constant choices when you write. the choices of the phrasing and even the spelling of the word are choices even though people would think that you have a single and set way of going about things.
I don't want to be a downer here, but that isn't really poetry as much as it is vulgar nonsense. And it's not even good nonsense. I think you should read more so you can get a better idea for what "form" in poetry is in addition to expanding your vocabulary and syntax.
i think that vulgar is an interesting word to use because there are many poets that i would think qualify as more "vulgar" depending on how u go about useing the word than i am in these poems. the most vulgar moments in these poems come in satanic bubblegum love poem which is just the intimation of two men loveing each other & later in untitled where i talk about wanting to be an omnipotent dick and sweateing during sex. you wouldn't have to go very far in literature to find things that are more "vulgar" and im not even sure if vulgarity should be used as a qualifier or quantifier or whatever word it is that im searching for for art.
this is something that ive thought a lot about and im very interested in either writing a collection of poems or a story or something that sees how far exactly you can get into the territory of the obscene, the graphic the sexual etc. before it is considered less art and more pornography. i feel no more violated in reading my poems than i do reading, say, mina loy, and i would even go as far as to say in terms of vulgarity i would feel more comfortable reading this stuff here to my 6 year old niece than i would songs to joannes.
i think that the nonsense that you are talking about mostly would be the opening of satanic bubblegum where i am presenting these images like "wow do this and this so i die" is very interesting altho perhaps weakly executed. i got the idea from reading other poets (ie: http://www.poemsaboutfriends.biz/2011/09/in-closing-drop-me-5-stories-onto-steel.html and http://www.poemsaboutfriends.biz/2011/09/strip-me-down.html ) who have undoubtedly executed it at a far higher level than i have but like i said i am working very hard on improveing my craft and i think that experimenting in a similar style and voice helps me assimilate what i feel are the more necessary important and interesting ideas from that kind of process or whatever. i think that what i tried here was something like "i want to die" not as a literal and melodramatic black curtains kind of phrase but more of a "i want to die" in the "this is what im feeling but not really" kind of way. i think this is the part of these poems where i am most nonsensical and i think that everywhere else i am being pretty clear and useing mostly clear images and techniques so maybe im just interpretting what u mean by nonsense wrong.
sneak, "a crocodile"... sneak planely and decapitate, swimsuited
WOW: Now That's What I Call Music Vol. 2
see? mammals! facepainted sinophile, plumbing the depths...
WOW: Now That's What I Call Music Vol. 3 bathe me baby, you ultimate predator let's make a deal
You be the room, I'll be the board Let's linger while others advance You: Finger. I: Pants. Your trigger a delicate dance.
WOW: Now That's What I Call Music Vol. 5
bubble me gum bubble, me gum bubble me, gum gubble me, bum chew me, a plum, and expect (or eight) the devil belongs to us all.
i will be here long after you have gone
wow this is so good haha i love this. boost
edit i forgot to add @farvacola that the choices i make in regards to my limited vocabulary and also the limited syntax is also something that i did intentionally and was conscious of in arranging the poem. a lot of the time im striving for a sort of minimalism when i write these. i am very glad that u guys raised such great objections tho to this because a lot of what im trieing to do when im writting this is challenge the sort of assumptions and notions that you have of what poetry and literature "is" and kind of rejecting the model that been provided for me (and every other poet that is born every day).
i think with just txt its a little hard to get into because its a certain aesthetic but i think if u listen to a reading of it you understand it a little bit more (also if u have more familiarity with the poets)
heres a video of him reading some selections:
he reads "drop me 5 stories" at 4:05, and then "strip me down" is at 6:20
if u want too here's some less dark readings (love poetry b/c thats all i rly listen to nowadays)
jk the last one is pretty dark too
i think that what steve roggenbuck is doing w/ poetry is something that is really interesting and fresh and new and i think that a lot of the directions he is going with his ideas (not just in his poetry but his approach to literature and poetry in general) is really cool. its not often nowadays that poetry gets people excited but i think that he is (well pretty much all of alt lit) creating a kind of poetry and literature that people can get excited about and be passionate about and something that isnt boring, something that is interesting and gets people wanting to read and write and talk about poetry.
i lost it at wow turn me into bubble gum chew me 666 times then spit me out onto the sidewalk i will be satanic bubble gum on the sidewalk i will be satanic bubble gum in the places that gum can be i will be satanic bubble gum in the discarded gum wrappers in the trash can i will be satanic bubble gum on the bottom of your shoe when it rains i will be satanic bubble gum underneath some daughter’s desk so she doesn’t get caught chewing satanic bubble gum in class,
Yes. Yes you are writing as paul fussel says you shouldn't do. Your poems are loaded with abstractions and no sense for music. Think more about how you say things over what you say. write some short stories. What applies to good prose applies to poetry.
your influence's so called "originality" is nothing but horrorcore and anti-intellectualism. It sounds like Lil B. An angsty Lil B, but white, privileged, and high on LSD instead of weed. He's stated himself that he's writing bad poetry on purpose (i've been googling this shit madly the last hour, don't deny it.) Lil B music is purposely shit in the same vein. It's just ironic, meme-influenced, txt-talk-like, blithe hipster pointlessness.
There is very little to any of his poems. Nothing past the initial shock (the love poems too, really solely on shock). Read palanhiuk's short story "Guts" if you want something like this done well. Read Ginsberg. Read Burroughs. Read Bukowski. Read something serious. Learn to write serious work. Learn to actually feel.
Does any of this actually speak to people? Sure you might get some laughs, or some pseudo-intellectual blather, but does anyone care for it past the microphone, past the stage?
Hey AiurZ, It interests me to see what you compose. I admire parts of your work. The images are interesting and effective. The tone evokes emotion. i think it's something good you are doing. I advise u to write what you want to and to disregard people who tell you what is poetry(though i'm totally into the links that that guy posted up above) That said, I think there it is important to rememeber that art and expressing emotions are different??(if that makes sense, i'm really not clear on this whole "art" thing)
I was emotionally taken by the guy reading in those videos you posted. I think you may be stealing his style a bit too much for your own good. I couldn't help but notice you both replaced "fuck" for "frick". I think it suits him more. I think it is because he has a more specific style of voice that he is trying to use. Like, he has something one might name a "tone" in colour a "key" or a style? Tell me if you agree.
I think if his work strikes you as something you would like to do, it might be helpful to keep in mind that a large part of his effect is the way he says it. That means like.. so his work is primarily an oral craft and so that would mean you'd be better off going to an open mic night and reading it out at a bar so you can communicate more of the nuance of the emotions.
Also to the people who don't understand why someone would write "drop me onto a spike", that type of writing is interesting just for its impact. It's not all the time one thinks about such painful things. It is interesting ot see waht the imagination can make of language.
Now now Docvoc, OP took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. Instead of "stopping by woods on a snowy evening", he'd prefer he stop by the satanic bubblegum rape factory on a sordid rainy twilight and have his eyes gouged out by penises. And why shouldn't he?
i dunno what u mean by filled with abstractions, because i think that most of these poems are composed of concrete images. outlandish, unrealistic, impossible aside (these are all choices that i make in my creative process) they are still concrete images.
i dunno what u mean by lacking in music because i took some time to scan thru satanic bubble gum love poem and i think that not only is it regular and not only does it employ the sort of devices that you would want to employ in a loosely structured poem but it also variates from this in meaningful way.s i would say more about my own work but i am more interested in talking about poetry generally instead
i disagree when you say that steve roggenbuck writes intentionally bad poetry. i think that useing the word "bad" and "good" to describe poetry is dubious. i think that generalizing steve roggenbuck as "horrorcore" and "anti-intellectual" is way off base and wrong. i think that these are kinds of criticisms that u might have seen levied on poets like allen ginsberg.
if u want to argue that there is little in the way of textual substance to steve roggenbucks poetry i think that you are approaching it from entirely the wrong angle. i think that his poetry goes beyond the page and part of its power comes from his readings and his web presence and his brand. not only that, i think that his poems offer a lot textually, and that have a lot of power even beyond the initial "shock" that u try to describe
ie this passage from somewhere in the bottom of the rain:
i turn you with slow animals i turn you in the dark trees i have you with me in the dark trees i am tryig to put you somewhere else in the dark trees too i am like the giraffe of you wow i am kising 25 birds when i kis you
i think that if walt whitman were a poet in these times that he would be writing lines like these. u find these kinds of lines all throughout steve roggenbucks poetry.
i think its funny that u would mention chuck palahniuk especially "guts" in criticizing the poems i posted above because i have read a lot of chuck palahniuk and even the story u mentioned and i think that for the most part that chuck palahniuk is unsuccessful and boring and relies on his own sort of shock value and gimmicks just as much if not more than steve roggenbuck.
@meteorskunk i am trying to develop my craft and it is interesting to me to make the same sort of creative decisions as other poets do. it helps me in trying to understand why they make the choices that they make and what sorts of things are successful and unsuccessful about it. the choice between "frick" and "fuck" in satanic bubble gum love poem is a conscious one. the line as i originally conceived it read "fuck" but i think that "frick" fits better within the poem and within the meaning of the line itself. i think that other parts i borrow without the same mindfulness but i am confident in the choice of "frick".
@docvoc i think that frost would be deeply appreciative of my poem because it is in the loose iambic meter.